Alison Luterman

Because Even the Word Obstacle is an Obstacle

Try to love everything that gets in your way:the Chinese women in flowered bathing capsmurmuring together in Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lanewhile you execute thirty-six furious laps,one for every item on your to-do list.The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side,whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.Teachers all. Learn to be smalland swim through obstacles like a minnowwithout grudges or memory. Dart toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking Obstacleis another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girlidly lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.Be glad shell have that to look at all her life, and keep going, keep going. Swim by an unclein the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephewhow to hold his breath underwater,even though kids arent allowed at this hour. Someday, years from now, this boy who is kicking and flailing in the exact placeyou want to touch and turnwill be a young man, at a wedding on a boatraising his champagne glass in a toastwhen a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.He'll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,but he'll come up like a cork,alive. So your moment of impatience must bow in service to a larger story, because if something is in your way it isgoing your way, the wayof all beings; towards darkness, towards light.